HOME PAGE

Monday, March 5, 2012

President Ruth Simmons Steps Down as President of Brown University

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Simmons to Step Down as President of Brown U.: 10 years into her term, she remains the only black leader of an Ivy League campus,"by Jack Stripling--
Ruth J. Simmons, who made history in 2001 when she was named the first black president of an Ivy League institution, will step down from the leadership of Brown University at the end of the academic year, the university announced on Thursday.

Ms. Simmons's presidency was baptized by fire. When she took the helm at Brown, the university was embroiled in a difficult and contentious debate about the wounds of slavery. The conversation was sparked by David J. Horowitz, a conservative writer who ran an advertisement in the student-run newspaper, The Brown Daily Herald, arguing against paying reparations to black descendants of slaves.

Mr. Horowitz placed or attempted to place advertisements in multiple student papers, seeking a national conversation about providing reparations, which he argued would be "racist."

"It is impossible to know what you'll be given to deal with when you're in a leadership position," Ms. Simmons told The Chronicle on Thursday. "Would it have been my fondest wish to come into a presidency at the very moment the Horowitz matter was being resolved? No.

"At the time, I felt it was an enormous burden to carry," she continued. "I could not obscure the fact that my race would be the centerpiece of it all, in a sense. But I just don't believe it's fair or appropriate for people to complain about the fact that they are dealing with issues that are particular to their identities."

Responding to the controversy, Ms. Simmons established a Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, charging the group with preparing a full account of the university's relationship to slavery. While the committee stopped short of recommending payment of reparations to the descendants of slaves, it called for an overt acknowledgment of "Brown's part in grievous crimes," finding that the university and some of its earliest benefactors had profited from the slave trade.

Dr. Ruth Simmons

That accounting led to several new efforts, including the establishment of an endowment to support public education for students in Providence, R.I., as well as the creation of tuition-free fellowships for a new master's degree in urban education and urban-education policy.

'Going Back to Teach'
Ms. Simmons's resignation will end her run of what will be 17 years as a university president. She came to Brown from Smith College, where she began as president in 1995.

She is a graduate of Dillard University, in New Orleans, rising from what she described as "a small college that few people have ever heard of" to the top of one of the nation's pre-eminent research universities. She earned a Ph.D. in Romance languages and literatures from Harvard University.

While Ms. Simmons remains the Ivy League's only black president, she said she's encouraged by the diversity she sees in the presidencies of top research universities in the United States. She noted, for instance, that women now have far greater representation in the leadership of institutions that belong to the Association of American Universities. Indeed, the leadership landscape has changed considerably in the last decade, Ms. Simmons said.

"When I went to my first Ivy League presidents' meeting, I didn't feel particularly welcome," she said.

Ms. Simmons set significant goals for herself early in her presidency. She said she wanted to raise the number of faculty members at Brown by 100 or more, and that 20-percent increase has come to pass over the course of her presidency, university officials said.

The university recently completed a $1.6-billion capital campaign, which Ms. Simmons said had created a fine bookend to her tenure.

"It seems to be the ideal time to take a step back and allow the university to move forward," she said. "Seventeen years is long enough."

After she steps down, Ms. Simmons said, she plans to continue as a professor of comparative literature and Africana studies at Brown. When asked about speculation that she might be considered for a post as U.S. secretary of education, Ms. Simmons stated no such interest.

"Ah, yeah, yeah," she said. "I'm going back to teach."

President Ruth Simmons of Brown University

'No Apologies'--While Ms. Simmons shares some of the same challenges and opportunities that many presidents of major research universities face, she has spent the last decade both dealing with and reveling in the peculiarities of Brown. Student protests and social-justice movements are embedded in the fabric of the institution, which is known as one of the nation's most progressive universities.

Brown's campus is so unpredictable that Ms. Simmons recently told The Chronicle that she never leaves Providence for more than a week. That's saying something for a president who regularly travels abroad, particularly to Asia. "You don't leave for three weeks because you don't know what you'll find when you get back," she said in a March interview.

The freewheeling nature of Brown, however, is also one of its assets, Ms. Simmons added. In 1969 the university adopted the "New Curriculum," which allows students to chart their own courses of study.

That curriculum is a piece of Brown's distinctiveness, but it is also something its presidents are often called upon to defend and explain.

"This model we have might seem lax, but we think of it as being a very challenging and rigorous approach, fit for students who are highly motivated, very intelligent, and able to handle the responsibility of the open curriculum," Ms. Simmons said.

The same sorts of students for whom Brown is a good fit are also prone to questioning authority, and Ms. Simmons has faced some tough questions during her tenure.

"I don't think anybody fears me," she said in March. "I say that with a little bit of regret."

Brown University

In 2009, Ms. Simmons endured intense criticism from students and alumni when her years-long service on the board of Goldman Sachs, the banking and investment firm, came into the spotlight. With the wounds of the financial crisis still very raw, and the widespread public loathing of Wall Street at its height, news of Ms. Simmons's role in the awarding of multimillion-dollar financial bonuses to the company's executives struck some in the Brown community as unseemly. An article in The New York Times took a particularly critical view of her role.

Ms. Simmons, who stepped down from the Goldman Sachs board in 2010, said she had joined the board at the behest of the trustees at Smith. But she said she had "no apologies" for having followed their advice.

"The fact that other people have opinions about things has really not touched me very deeply," she said. "I have a very, very strong compass, and that was given to me by my parents." Criticism in a newspaper article, she added, "will not throw me off my course, frankly."(source: http://chronicle.com/article/Simmons-to-Step-Down-as/129043/)

Runaway Slave Gordon. From the Smithsonian Photography Initiativ e, "Photography changes the way we record and respond to social...

Capoeira

African Martial Arts of Brazil

About the Banjo by Tony Thomas

The banjo is a product of Africa. Africans transported to the Caribbean and Latin America were reported playing banjos in the 17th and 18th centuries, before any banjo was reported in the Americas. Africans in the US were the predominant players of this instrument until the 1840s.

Charleston Slave Tags and Slave Badges

Badge laws existed in several Southern cities, urban centers such as Mobile and New Orleans, Savannah and Norfolk; the practice of hiring out slaves was common in both the rural and urban South. But the only city known to have implemented a rigid and formal regulatory system is Charleston.

MANILLA: MONEY OF THE SLAVE TRADE

Manilla. Manillas were brass bracelet-shaped objects used by Europeans in trade with West Africa, from about the 16th century to the 1930s. They were made in Europe, perhaps based on an African original.Once Bristol entered the African trade, manillas were made locally for export to West Africa.

SLAVE CURRENCY: African Slave Trade Beads

In Africa, trade beads were used in West Africa by Europeans who got them from Venice, Holland, and Bohemia. They used millions of beads to trade with Africans for slaves, services, and goods such as palm oil, gold, and ivory. The trade with Africans was so vital that some of the beads were made specifically for Africans.

Slave Trade Currency: Cowry Shells

Long before our era the cowry shell was known as an instrument of payment and a symbol of wealth and power. This monetary usage continued until the 20th century. If we look a bit closer into these shells it is absolutely not astonishing that varieties as the cypraea moneta or cypraea annulus were beloved means of payments and eventually became in some cases huge competitors of metal currencies.

Bunce Island Slave Factory

Cannons with the Royal Crest

Adanggaman

Africans Making Slaves of Africans

Ota Benga The Man in the Bronx Zoo

Ota Benga (1883-1916) was an African Congolese Pygmy, who was put on display in the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo in New York in1906

Railroads and Slave Labor

North America's four major rail networks — Norfolk Southern, CSX, Union Pacific and Canadian National — all own lines that were built and operated with slave labor.

Sculptor Augusta Savage

"Lift every voice and sing" by Augusta Savage: New York World's Fair.

Afro-Uruguay Spirit of Resistance in Candombe

In the streets of Montevideo, Uruguay, Afro-Uruguayans celebrate an often-ignored part of their history - Candombe and resistance.

Tintin: Sinister Racist Propaganda

Tintin has been an inspiration for generations. But his status as a paragon of wholesome adventure is under threat, thanks to a court bid to ban one of his books, Tintin in the Congo, for its racist portrayal of Africans.

W.E.B. DuBois

"It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." -- W.E.B. DuBois

Slave Tortures

Portugal Slave Trade

1501-1866 Portugal transported 5,848,265 people from Africa to the Americas.

French Slave Trade

1501-1866 France transported 1,381,404 Africans to America.

Great Britain Slave Trade

1501-1866 The British transported 3,259,440 Africans to the Americas.

Spain Slave Trade

1501-1866 Spain transported 1,061,524 Africans to the Americas

Denmark Slave Trade

1501-1866 Denmark transported 111,041 people from Africa.

United States Slave Trade

1501-1866 The USA transported 305,326 Africans to the Americas.

Netherlands Slave Trade

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?" — Marcus Tullius Cicero